Favicon Generator

What is a favicon?

A favicon — short for "favourite icon" — is the small square image a browser shows in the tab, the bookmark bar, the history list, and the home-screen shortcut on mobile. It's the smallest piece of branding your site has, but it does a lot of work: it helps people pick your tab out of a crowded window and makes a saved bookmark instantly recognisable. Because it renders at tiny sizes, a good favicon is simple — a single letter, a monogram, an emoji, or a bold mark rather than a detailed logo. This generator draws your text or emoji onto a canvas with the background, colour, and shape you choose, then lets you download a clean PNG.

Which favicon sizes do you actually need in 2026?

You need far fewer sizes than the classic "export sixteen files" advice suggests. A 32×32 PNG handles desktop browser tabs and bookmarks. A 180×180 PNG serves as the Apple touch icon for iOS home screens. 192×192 and 512×512 PNGs declared in a web app manifest cover Android and installable PWAs. A small favicon.ico at the site root remains a handy universal fallback. If you add a single scalable SVG, modern browsers will prefer it and render crisply at every density, so the practical set is just an SVG, one or two PNGs, and an ICO fallback.

ICO vs PNG vs SVG favicons

ICO is the original Windows icon container; it can bundle several raster sizes (16, 32, 48) into one file and is still the safest /favicon.ico fallback for old clients. PNG is a single-size lossless raster — simple, supported everywhere, and the right choice when you declare explicit sizes in your HTML head. This tool exports PNG, which you can use directly or convert to ICO if you need the legacy fallback. SVG is vector, so one file scales to any resolution and can even switch colours in dark mode using media queries. The modern recommendation is an SVG for sharp scaling, a 32×32 PNG and 180×180 Apple touch icon for compatibility, and an ICO at the root to catch everything else.